Mobile Homes (Requirement for Manager of Site to be Fit and Proper Person) (England) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

Moved by

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 8 July be approved.

The regulations were laid before this House on 8 July 2020. Their purpose is to prohibit the use of land as a residential mobile home site unless the local authority is satisfied that the owner, or manager, of the site is a fit and proper person to do so.

I begin with the background to these important regulations. The Government are committed to ensuring that everyone, including park home residents, has a safe, secure and affordable place to live. Park home sites make a valuable contribution to the housing sector. The majority of site owners in England provide a professional service to their residents, most of whom are elderly and many are among the most vulnerable people in our society. Sadly, their good work can be overshadowed by the minority of unscrupulous operators within the sector.

To address ongoing problems caused by such unscrupulous operators, the Government introduced the Mobile Homes Act 2013, which implemented a new local authority site licensing regime in England. In 2017, the Government carried out a review of the park homes legislation. The evidence indicated that the measures introduced under the 2013 Act had brought significant improvements to the sector. For example, site owners blocking residents from selling their homes had been eliminated and the pitch fee review process had become more open and transparent. However, the review demonstrated that some site owners continued to exploit financially and harass vulnerable residents. In some cases, residents were asked to pay £40,000 for a new long-term agreement to stay on a site, something that should have been given to them for free in the first place. In others, the use of variable service charges led to increases in pitch fees of about £1,000 a year. These practices are unacceptable. Unscrupulous site owners must not be allowed to extract ever more cash from those who may already be on fixed or low incomes, or to harass or intimidate them without any fear of being sanctioned. The case for change is compelling.

These regulations will level the playing field for the majority of good site owners and help drive up standards of management and conduct across the park homes sector. Site owners who manage their sites professionally need not be concerned about meeting the required standards, but the minority who continue to abuse and exploit residents will have to improve or make way for more professional people to manage the site.

The regulations will prohibit the use of land as a residential mobile home site unless the local authority is satisfied that the owner or manager of the site is a fit and proper person to do so. The site owner will be required to provide mandatory information, such as whether they have committed certain offences or breached certain legislation, to enable the local authority to assess the applicant’s suitability to manage the site.

A range of other factors, such as the conduct of the applicant, may also affect an applicant’s suitability. That is why these regulations give local authorities the discretion that they need to make informed and holistic decisions. The regulations will also require local authorities to establish and maintain an online register of people who they are satisfied are fit and proper to manage a site in their area. This will mean that existing residents, prospective purchasers and other local authorities will know who is managing each site and whether any conditions are attached to their entry on the register. Should any site owner fail to maintain high standards of conduct and management after they have been placed on the register, a local authority will be able to review their entry and either remove them, attach new conditions or vary an existing condition attached to that entry. If the local authority rejects an application or removes a person from the register, and the site owner is unable to find an alternative fit and proper manager, the local authority will be able to appoint a new manager, with consent from the site owner.

My Lords, I am very grateful to be able to take part in this debate. It is the first time I have spoken in a debate with the Minister and I congratulate him. These are very strong and tough regulations, which are clearly necessary. I commend the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Kirkhope, on the work that they have put in over the years in bringing all this to the Government’s attention, and I commend the Government on bringing these regulations before the House.

From the Explanatory Memorandum, it is clear that there is a great deal of work for local authorities to do—and rightly so. It starts off with considering applications, in paragraph 7.8, and goes on to maintaining a register, in paragraph 7.10, and the monitoring that goes with it. Paragraph 7.13 talks about the ability to reject applications and, of course, requesting further information. I can see that local authorities will have a lot of work to do to get the information from the kind of people who may be covered by this regulation.

Of course, lots more information is needed. There is the ability to appeal to a First-tier Tribunal and there are three criminal offences. This is really good and important, but can the Minister give any idea of how much each application might cost if opposed? He said that local authorities would be able to charge to cover their costs, but is there going to be a limit to how much they can charge? I am really concerned about local authorities’ ability to deal with this along with all the other work that they have been given at the moment. How much extra money, if any, has been given to them for this? I am sure that the Minister will say that the Government have given enormous amounts of funds to local authorities this year, but they have also given them a lot of extra work to do.

Finally, can the Minister give me some indication as to how many applications around the country are likely to be received in the first year or two and try to give us as much comfort as possible that local authorities will have the ability and resources to deal with them? These are important regulations, and I look forward to listening to some of the comments from the experts who are following me.

My Lords, I strongly support these regulations, which are very important for the protection of vulnerable people living on mobile home sites. The need for these regulations, which ensure the safety of those living on mobile home sites, is illustrated by one of the most despicable cases in recent years: the 2013 discovery on a mobile home site in south Wales of two persons who had been enslaved for 13 years.

In September 2013, following a tip-off, police raided a site outside Newport and discovered human slavery at its worst. One of those rescued, Darrell Simester, who was originally from Kidderminster, published a book some three years later describing the 13 years of hell that he had endured as a slave. Darrell, who has autism, was first forced to work for 15 hours a day, without pay, in appalling conditions. He worked on a farm for two meals a day, and for 11 of the 13 years had to wash himself in a horse trough. For the final few years, he lived in a caravan in terrible conditions, wearing filthy clothes and losing some of his teeth. Thankfully, Darrell now lives independently with support, and the perpetrators have received long prison sentences.

This site was, however, listed by the local authority—certainly for most of the time Darrell was incarcerated there. That is why this legislation is so urgently needed: to give protection to vulnerable people like Darrell and to support those harassed by unscrupulous owners of sites.

I have some questions that I hope the Minister can answer. First, what reassurance does this legislation provide for close collaboration between the police and local authorities? In the case I referred to it was the police who received a tip-off and initiated action. This legislation places the responsibility on much-stretched local authorities. How will this important relationship between local authorities and the police be managed? I understand that some of it will be covered by DBS certificates.

My Lords, I had the privilege of taking the Mobile Homes Act 2013 through the House. It came to us as a Private Member’s Bill from the other place, where it had been brilliantly championed and piloted through its legislative stages by my colleague Peter Aldous MP.

Then and subsequently, I visited a number of these residential park home sites and met the usually retired and sometimes vulnerable residents, the owners of these static caravans. In some cases, a happy community has become established and the management of the site is perfectly satisfactory. It has, however, been shocking to learn of the exploitation, harassment and intimidation at the hands of site owners—some with criminal records—who have acquired sites expressly to extract hefty pitch fees from the residents with threats of cutting off electricity and gas supplies, or, worse, to bully elderly residents into leaving so the site owner could make big profits when the mobile homes were sold.

At the time of the 2013 Act, we debated the issue of requiring managers of park home sites to be “fit and proper persons”. Although the Act provided for such a requirement, it was hoped that the other measures in the legislation would be so successful in ending the bad behaviour of a minority of dreadful operators that this extra step would be unnecessary. The Act did indeed outlaw some dreadful abuses and has made a very real difference to the lives of many of the 180,000 people who occupy these homes. But sadly, as predicted at the time, appalling behaviour by a few site owners has persisted and the measure before us today—albeit a little slow in emerging, with its implementation coming eight years after the Act—is very necessary, as is agreed by the reputable site owners’ trade body, the British Holiday & Park Homes Association.

The question in my mind is: will the fit and proper person test be adequately enforced? Will local authorities have the resources, skills and motivation to make this new requirement a reality? Will MHCLG accompany the new obligation before us today with the funds and central government support that can make it meaningful? Fees charged to the site owners seem likely to be no more than £250 to £500 for a five-year certification of fit and proper status. This is equivalent to £50 to £100 per site per annum, so a council with 10 park home sites —not untypical—could count on only £500 to £1,000 a year to ensure its officers were trained and equipped to apply and enforce the fit and proper person test, sometimes having to pursue some pretty slippery customers. So, in strongly supporting the regulation, I ask the noble Lord the Minister for some reassurance that local authorities will be funded and assisted to implement it.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, who has unparalleled knowledge and experience in this area; we all owe him a massive debt for his work in this area. I thank my noble friend the Minister for setting out so lucidly this measure on mobile homes, which I very much welcome.

We know that there are many very effective site managers who provide a valuable service but, alas, there is a small minority who disregard the law and harass and exploit residents, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Best, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord German, who gave a particularly graphic and appalling example. The Explanatory Memorandum published for these regulations confirms that failure to introduce this measure would result in many vulnerable and elderly residents

“continuing to suffer from poor and unprofessional behaviour”.

I agree with that assessment, and I am very pleased that we are acting.

I have several questions for my noble friend the Minister, which I am sure he will be able to answer but, if he is not able to on this occasion, I am happy to receive a letter. The first relates to the “fit and proper person” and the local register. I am concerned that this register—indeed, not just the register but the background to it—should be something that can be shared with other local authorities and with other bodies and communities, such as the Gypsy and Traveller community. In parentheses, I am very pleased to see that MHCLG has been engaging with the Gypsy and Traveller community, and I thank it for doing so.

It is important that we have communication and collaboration between different local authorities so that experience can be shared. I know from the Public Services Committee, on which I serve and which is looking at the aftermath of Covid, how important the ability to share data is. I know that, sometimes, there are bars to this and I wonder if the Minister can say anything about how we can cut through the general data protection regulation if it is providing an unnecessary impediment to collaboration. I also hope that the devolved Administrations are able to play a part and share their experience. All the devolved Administrations have separate laws, though parallel and similar in some respects, but it would be good to know that they can collaborate and communicate.

My Lords, having been in dispute with the powers that be over the peremptory truncation of this debate, I shall simply place on record the comments of Ros Pritchard, who heads the British Holiday & Home Parks Association, the lead trade body. She wrote:

“We are concerned that the fit-and-proper scheme as proposed will not meet its objective as a deterrent to the worst site owners. We feel that the bureaucratic system will give official fit-and-proper endorsement to park owners already denounced as rogues. We provided evidence to the Government about fit-and-proper regimes introduced in Wales which led to not one application being refused under a tick-box approach. Sadly, this system has given an endorsement to some of the very park owners already denounced as rogues. We also provided evidence showing how powers provided to local authorities under the Mobile Homes Act 2013 were simply not used or used ineffectively. Councils have neither resources nor expertise to implement these essential powers. Their legal departments feel forced to adopt a cautious approach to mobile homes regulations. When faced with applications by rogue park owners with expert legal teams, they feel obliged to grant fit-and-proper endorsement to avoid expensive legal challenge. Where one authority approves, others who refuse will become more vulnerable to the legal challenges, thereby discouraging even more authorities from effective action. These regulations only require the manager to meet criteria about background. With the legal structure of the business easily arranged by rogue operators, many councils will lack both resources and expertise to question business practices. He who pays the piper will call the tune, despite the fit-and-proper status of appointed managers. Finally, why impose on local authorities a regime which unnecessarily only replicates the role of individual officers? Sadly, the only people that benefit on this system will be lawyers dealing with appeals following inconsistent decisions and not vulnerable homeowners who deserve the protection of effective licensing systems. We need government to ensure consistency, resource and expertise in tackling rogue park operators. These regs are not enough.”

My Lords, these regulations are an important milestone of the Mobile Homes Act. The Government have carried out considerable consultation in two stages. It is right that proper scrutiny is carried out on the site owner and the site manager about their integrity and ability to operate the site professionally. They give the powers to local authorities to make a proper assessment of both the owner and the site manager so that there cannot be any criminals among the owners or the site managers before issuing a licence for a site.

The regulations also provide an appeal provision for the site owner and the site manager if their application is rejected by the local authority. If the owner or the manager breaches the conditions of the lease, there is an unlimited fine that can be imposed. A repeat of the offence could enable the local authority to withdraw or remove the manager or the owner. The most important aspect of these regulations is that they will protect residents who are elderly and vulnerable. Whatever government regulations are made must protect the residents.

There appears to be no provision for the residents who are unable to pay their rents. The site owners run these sites as a business and are entitled to receive the monthly rents. If the rents are not paid, the owners are entitled to evict the tenants. This will create a problem for the local authorities, which will have to find accommodation to avoid homelessness. According to a report from Shelter and other agencies, the Government’s decision to allow landlords to evict tenants is going to make more than 100,000 people, including single mothers with children, homeless. A balance must be found between the rights of the landlord and those of the tenants in this Covid era.

My Lords, I am pleased to support these regulations and I particularly congratulate the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Best, on pursuing them so strongly. All of us who have ever been elected representatives know that the issue of mobile homes has been a regular part of our post box, especially in regard to the treatment of those who choose this way of life by those who control sites.

Many people for various reasons want the option of acquiring a fixed or static home on the numerous and ever-growing number of sites around the country. Some are mobile homes that can be moved easily and are on sites where permanent residence is not permitted, but others are park homes where the licence permits permanent residence. It is the latter where the new protections afforded by this measure are most needed.

My noble friend knows that, unlike a normal house, such a home on a site does not have the same advantages. For instance, mortgages are not normally possible. Unlike other property, there can be no expectation of increased values. There are uncertain and sometimes excessive maintenance costs. Often a commission is charged by a site owner on sales. Energy bills are often under the sole control of the site owner. The site normally remains in the possession of the site owner, whose title may be tenuous. The rent or occupation agreement may be short and renewal is not always guaranteed. The occupancy itself may be subject to onerous site rules. Of course, there are inheritance issues on the death of an occupant. I have heard of many cases of dispute where the behaviour of site owners or their corporate representatives has been either threatening or discriminatory or where rules have been used as a way of spoiling the peaceful enjoyment and tenure of the site for individuals.

These regulations are a positive step, but can I press my noble friend on the following quick points? How will the definition of fit and proper person be made and how will it be regularised? Will the date for stage 1— July 2021—be rigidly adhered to by local authorities in their preparations? How will local authorities appoint a fit and proper person to control a site if the owners cannot themselves provide one? Under the regulations, the register of fit and proper persons will stand for up to five years. Will monitoring take place on a regular basis to maintain standards and will complaints about conduct be promptly investigated and registration removed in appropriate cases without undue bureaucracy and pressure on residents? Finally, in the case of companies or corporate management, how will the fit and proper designation be assessed? I am sure these regulations, although overdue, will be widely welcomed and the protection afforded should give some comfort at least to all those who choose a park home life.